Last week, we asked you to set sail and explore the soulful world of Tchia using #PSshare #PSBlog. Here are this week’s highlights:

call_me_xavii shares Tchia wearing casual clothes and a baseball cap sitting by a fire

asensualmanatee shares Tchia sitting on a hill with the sky red with the sunset

photo_station5 shares Tchia on her boat headed towards land with a mountain and the sun in the center background

godhatesash shares a close up look at golden brown cow with white horns

kani3_sun shares Tchia soul-jumped into a cat sitting in a field of grass

FMJLullaby shares Tchia and her father out of focus as their friend arrives on his boat.

Search #PSshare #PSBlog on Twitter or Instagram to see more entries to this week’s theme. Want to be featured in the next Share of the Week? 

THEME: Resident Evil 4
SUBMIT BY: 11:59 PM PT on April 5, 2023

Next week, what’re ya sharin’? Share action-packed moments exploring and fighting back as Leon S. Kennedy in Resident Evil 4 using #PSshare #PSBlog for a chance to be featured.

Set to be released for PlayStation 5 on June 22, Final Fantasy XVI is the next mainline installment of the Final Fantasy series, which follows Clive Rosfield, the protagonist, as he harnesses the power of multiple summons to overcome his tragic destiny. The game is the first full-fledged action RPG in the Final Fantasy series and features high-speed battles in which players switch between the powers of various Eikons, as well as large-scale Eikon vs. Eikon battles.

We spoke with the main director, Hiroshi Takai, about how the game harnesses PS5’s power and how it was optimized and developed for PS5.

As a developer, what were your first impressions of the power and technology of the PS5?

Hiroshi Takai: The two main things that struck me were the size of the memory and the speed of the SSD. I’ve worked with a lot of different hardware over the years, and many have failed to strike the right balance between the capabilities of the hardware and the size of the memory. However, the PS5 is different—it comes with enough memory installed to take full advantage of the hardware. As for the SSD, as we were building the game, I was simply blown away by how fast it was.

The Final Fantasy franchise is known for the quality of its graphics. Final Fantasy XVI was developed as a PS5 game first and foremost, so how did you take advantage of the power of the hardware when it came to the graphics and the gameplay?

Naturally, we wanted the graphics to be the best that they could be, so we put a lot of focus on the fine details of the character and environmental models, as well as the quality of the lighting and the shadows, to really make them shine. It’s really resource-intensive just to render these models on screen, and the lighting and shadow effects are then layered on top of that. We’re only able to do this thanks to the size of the PS5’s memory. Clive, the protagonist of FFXVI, can unleash a wide range of attacks, and the animations and effects for them can all fit in the memory, too. And the way that the game seamlessly flows between resource-intensive gameplay to equally intensive cutscenes and back again wouldn’t be possible if it wasn’t for the speed of the SSD.

Could you explain a little bit about how FFXVI makes use of the PS5 DualSense controller’s adaptive triggers and haptic feedback in battle and exploration?

There are certain sections where the player will have to open heavy doors or lift up portcullises, and we use the adaptive triggers there to put across that feeling of effort and resistance. They’re also used when riding chocobos. The haptic feedback can produce extremely subtle vibrations, which we use to create a heightened feeling of presence in cutscenes. We converted the sound effects used in each scene into haptic data, which let us portray details that we’ve never been able to before, like the movements of the air.

Final Fantasy XVI will be the first fully-fledged action RPG in the history of the series. It’s a bold move to abandon the command system entirely. What was your aim with this?

That’s right, when it came to designing FFXVI, we wanted to see what would happen if we took it in a new direction and made it a full action RPG. We fine-tuned the gameplay so that when you take the DualSense controller in your hand, your every input produces a reaction that you can really feel. One of the main features of the battle system is the wide range of Eikonic abilities that Clive can unleash, and this results in a great deal of freedom in how players can approach battle. There are also the Eikon-on-Eikon battles, where the player controls the series’ famous summons directly, to add to the action. It’s a non-stop, white-knuckle ride from start to finish.

While the details of every Final Fantasy game might differ, they are always centered around a captivating story. The story of Final Fantasy XVI has a sense of tragic heroism at its heart, but could you tell us more about its themes?

When we started thinking about making a game for the PS5, we wanted to create a world where there was no disconnect between the graphics and the story. While it might go to some pretty dark places, it’s a world where that darkness only exists because light exists too, and our heroes go through the trials that they do precisely because  they have hope that things can get better. A world where every man, woman, and child has their own sense of what a “just” world should look like.

What other PS5 games have impressed you? From a developer’s point of view, how did you feel that they took advantage of the PS5’s capabilities?

I think God of War Ragnarok is a fantastic game. It’s a seamless experience from beginning to end, and paints a perfect picture of the relationship between a father and his son.

The world of Horizon is vast and majestic, featuring lush landscapes crowned by seemingly endless skies. When the team at Guerrilla began creating this world, developers of various disciplines considered how to bring an immersive level of life to the world. For Guerrilla’s Atmospherics team, this meant populating the skies with lifelike clouds. 

This work was evolved for Horizon Forbidden West. And now, in Burning Shores, Aloy will soar through more breathtaking, realistic skies than ever before. 

The approach  

“When we think of a horizon, we imagine vast expanses like the open ocean and how the clouds and the sun arc down to touch them at some immeasurable distance,” says Andrew Schneider, Principal FX Artist at Guerrilla. “Open-world games present developers with metaphorically similar challenges. How do we push the experience so that the player feels that they are in an environment that could be endless?” 

It was one thing to ask the question but another to break it down into technical tasks. 

In the early 2010s, feature film and animation VFX started using volumetric rendering to create clouds. For video games, this technique took too long to render with high-quality results at interactive framerates, but developers knew it held game-changing potential.

With innovations in hardware, this began to change. At the nexus of the PlayStation 4 in 2015, Andrew partnered with Nathan Vos, Principal Tech Programmer at Guerrilla. Together, they developed the highly efficient open-world volumetric cloud system that can be seen in Horizon Zero Dawn. The intricately detailed clouds framed Aloy’s world as a hopeful, beautiful one. It supported changes to the time of day and realistic animations, creating the sense of a fully living, breathing world. 

This established the foundation the team would build upon for Horizon Forbidden West. 

The evolution 

In video games, clouds can help convey a mood. Along with the abundance of green, clear waters and cragged cliffs, the clouds of Horizon punctuate the world with emotion. To achieve this, they had to be more than white wisps far above the Aloy’s head; they needed movement, variety, and definition. 

“We looked to artists who were part of the luminism movement for inspiration, like 19th-century painter Albert Bierstadt. These painters had mastered the interplay between clouds and the land beneath, using light and detail to create space, producing truly dramatic landscape paintings.   

“To recreate this effect in 3D, we had to develop a way to model clouds. For Horizon Zero Dawn, we’d explored various methods for creating cloudscapes. Voxels are blocks that can build volumetric 3D clouds. We’d actually made a cloud simulator and experimented with rendering three-dimensional ‘voxel’ data in real time.” 

“But technologically, it was too early for this,” Andrew recalls. “The hardware and software just weren’t at the right stage of development. So, we settled with modeling clouds in an efficient-to-render way that still yielded high-quality results, but with more modeling effort than simulation.” 

The solution was to paint fixed layers of clouds rather than individual formations. But this process would need to be expanded to support the addition of flying mounts in Horizon Forbidden West. 

For the sequel, Andrew and Nathan upgraded the rendering quality of the base system used in Zero Dawn, expanding it to support a new fog-like cloud that the player could fly through at low altitudes. This allowed for awe-inspiring atmospherics, like a superstorm with sinister vortex motion and internal lightning effects. Now, the clouds were a character of their own, rumbling with atmospheric tension. 

The next technical challenge 

Naturally, the next step was to continue innovating this system for Horizon Forbidden West: Burning Shores. For the expansion, the team has elevated the experience using voxel technology, among many other technical improvements throughout the world. 

“The cloud systems that we developed for Horizon Zero Dawn and Horizon Forbidden West were fast because they didn’t store clouds as 3D objects, but rather instructions on creating 3D clouds from limited 2D information. The PlayStation 5 can handle larger datasets. So, after Forbidden West wrapped, we set to work writing a voxel cloud renderer prototype that could live up to our standards for quality, and actually allow the player to fly through highly detailed cloud formations.” 

Achieving the balance between performance and quality when the player can be on the ground, and high up in the air was an ambitious challenge. Yet the prototype paid off, generating dense, dynamic results at low and high altitudes, a feat made possible by hard work, as well as the increased power of the PlayStation 5. 

But creating a single cloud was a long way from building an entire cloudscape. 

Andrew had created what he called “Frankencloudscapes” — large cloud formations so that the sky could be treated like as a landscape would by a terrain modeler. As a result, the cloudscape acted as both a background element and an environment to explore. 

To make this work at the scale needed for Burning Shores, a strike team at Guerrilla tackled the challenge of flying through clouds – the real test of performance and quality. Andrew teamed up with Nathan and brought in Hugh Malan, a Senior Principal Tech Programmer. 

The first hurdle they encountered was deeply technical: how do you handle a huge quantity of volumetric voxel data? 

“Hugh and I divided this issue to conquer it. I developed a way to take low-detail voxel data and add detail during rendering. Meanwhile, Hugh worked on compressing the data so it could be accessed faster from memory. Together, these processes made rendering Volumetric Voxel Clouds exponentially faster.” 

“But it still wasn’t fast enough,” Andrew recalls. “The costliest part of this process was calculating cloud lighting, which, in itself, is complicated. To get around this, Nathan engineered a method to reduce rendering time to a speed that would work for both standard and high frame rate modes.” 

“This was also one of those rare situations where an optimization produced a better visual result. It allowed us to cast cloud-to-cloud shadows over a much larger distance, improving realism. At this point, we had a method to render volumetric clouds from the ground and in the air, right up next to them.” 

The second challenge was balancing. “There is a dance that real-time graphics engineers do to balance quality and performance,” Andrew continues. “Quality usually comes at a ‘cost’ in terms of processing. So, every time we improve the quality of our clouds, we need to do so in a way that costs either as much as, or less than, the current cost of the cloud system.” 

To find this balance, Senior Principal Tech Programmer and graphics engineer James McLaren helped the team understand how the code behaved at a low level on the PlayStation hardware itself. His expertise allowed them to take full advantage of the hardware by optimizing code for the PlayStation 5. “James’ contributions were fundamental in the early stages of development, allowing Guerrilla to push the boundaries during production,” recalls Andrew.  

In the end, the pieces add up to give the player the awe-inspiring feeling of soaring through and around a cloudscape as accurate and varied as the land below. All on the back of their Sunwing. 

What awaits in Burning Shores 

When heading to the Burning Shores, Aloy will run into familiar machines and faces. But she will also discover new ways to explore her world. 

“It was important to us to make the experience fun and joyful on its own outside of the main gameplay. The clouds are not simply immersive scenery but an explorable landscape in themselves. Among the clouds, players will be able to explore tunnels, caves, and other surprises that make for fun flying,” says Andrew. 

“The best part is that depending on when you try any of these features, the experience will be different. As the day progresses, the quality and direction of light change, hiding and revealing some of these features and changing the feel of each journey. 

And I don’t want to spoil anything – but we hope you aren’t afraid of a little lightning.”

You’ve saved Eorzea in Final Fantasy XIV Online: A Realm Reborn and resolved a centuries’ old conflict with the dragons in Heavensward… what’s next for the Warrior of Light?

It’s time to head to the Far East. It’s time for Stormblood. And from now until May 8, 2023, this massive expansion is completely free for players who own or buy the Final Fantasy XIV Online Starter Edition!

Final Fantasy XIV: Stormblood took the critically acclaimed MMORPG to the next level, with a compellingly dark new story full of twists, turns and quests a-plenty, new mechanics, new jobs to get to grips with and a whole new part of the world to explore. Let’s take a closer look.

What is Final Fantasy XIV: Stormblood about?

After the events of Final Fantasy XIV: Heavensward, it’s time to take the fight to the sinister Garlean Empire. You and your allies make plans to liberate the conquered city state of Ala Mhigo, and you head out to meet the resistance.

Of course, things don’t really go to plan and before long you’re confronted by a new enemy… one who might be even stronger than the fabled Warrior of Light.

Meanwhile, in the Far East nation of Doma, freedom fighters struggle to rekindle the fires of hope in their countrymen. Will you be the spark that ignites the flames of rebellion and pushes the Empire out once and for all?

The main campaign of Stormblood is a sprawling epic that’s full of political intrigue, surprising revelations, and thrilling action. 

What was added to Final Fantasy XIV in the Stormblood expansion?

Stormblood broadened the already vast world of the game with new regions that are quite unlike anything in the game before. Ala Mhigo and Doma are the lands of monks, and ninja and samurai respectively, with a beautiful aesthetic inspired by the Far East.

They provide a terrific setting for the game’s main scenario to unfold – plus plenty of additional quests mean that there’s always something new to discover amongst the regions’ vast and beautiful landscapes.

The expansion also includes two additional jobs. When it comes to combat, do you prefer melee or magic? Stormblood asks: why not have both? The Red Mage job added in the expansion hands you a rapier and a magicked crystal medium, letting you dive in and out of combat, assault enemies with red magic, and even link multiple spells for massive damage. It’s a highly mobile, highly entertaining DPS role that’s really fun to play with.

Of course, the second job added in the expansion is just as wild… you can be a Samurai! This is another DPS job all about mastering the arts of Sen and Kenki. With your katana in hand, you can cut a swathe through foes, to build your power and unleash it in the form of powerful combos.

There are also plenty of new dungeons, new tribes and primals to encounter, a particularly awesome raid series from the creators of Final Fantasy XII and Final Fantasy Tactics that sees you ‘Return to Ivalice’ and much, much more.

It’s a massive amount of content, and – to remind you – it’s completely free! For full details on eligibility and how to claim your copy of Stormblood, head over to our support centre.

If we’ve piqued your interest in Stormblood, the FFXIV team at Square Enix will be releasing a series of deeper dives over the next few weeks, including interviews with the developers. Be sure to follow the official FFXIV channels to hear more.

I hope you’re excited to experience this unforgettable chapter in the Final Fantasy XIV Online saga.

I’ll see you in Ala Mhigo!

Baseball fans, MLB The Show 23 launches tomorrow! With that in mind, let’s discuss the modes to get you started.

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New Legends*

Play as more than 180 Legends from all Eras of Baseball. New Legends Derek Jeter, David Wright, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, and more join a star-studded list of Hall of Famers and generational talent. You can put together your dream outfield with Ken Griffey Jr., Willie Mays, and Babe Ruth while choosing between the greatest pitchers, such as Nolan Ryan, Randy Johnson, and closer Mariano Rivera. Look for a few hidden Legends to be announced after launch through Live Content and Roster Updates when you connect online.

Play Video

Gameplay updates

From ’22 to ’23, the San Diego Studio Gameplay Development Team continues striving to reach all types of players.

• High fielding attribute matters more now than ever before. The disparity between players in-game with high vs. low fielding attributes is more noticeable. Players with a lower Fielding attribute will react slower and have worse jumps to contact made off the bat compared to players with a high Fielding attribute.
• When it comes to our throwing interfaces, we have a couple to select from depending on player skill and engagement level. Our more player-friendly interfaces, Buttons and Analog, rely heavily on the Arm Accuracy attribute, which has been tuned to be in line with MLB statistics. Elevate your game with the Button Accuracy Meter, where you are in complete control of your throws.
• The pitcher-batter dynamic is better than ever with the revamped competitive gameplay engine. And don’t worry, Casual or Simulation fans, we have also tuned and balanced those gameplay styles as well.  
• We’ve added over 5,000 gameplay animations to MLB  The Show 23. We have hundreds of new animations ranging from: rob foul ball, dives, hot shot variety at the corners, and as always, animations for urgency and efficiency. 

Face Scan

Play Video

The Face Scan feature will allow you to scan your face and upload it into MLB The Show 23 with an internet-connected compatible mobile device and internet-connected compatible console.Download the MLB The Show companion app from the App Store or Google Play store. Take your selfie from the app and hit the upload button prompt once you’ve linked your companion app to your MLB The Show account. Once you’ve uploaded your face scan into the game, you can edit your hairstyle, facial hair, and fine-tune your skin tone. You can use your new avatar with your face in all game modes that support your created player.

Franchise Mode improvements

Franchise mode and March To October both received overhauls to the amateur draft scouting and signing system this year, but that’s not all.

• New Postseason format  
• CBA Changes
• Full Implementation of the Ohtani rule
• Updated Competitive Balance Tax
• Minimum Salaries
• Updated MLB Draft Experience
• Amateur Scouting system

Diamond Dynasty*

This year, it’s all about theme teams with new Captains that boost your squad, and the return of Team Affinity programs loaded with Diamond rewards from all 30 clubs. Also, new in MLB The Show 23, play with your friends to earn rewards in new Ranked Online Co-Op 2 vs. 2 or 3 vs. 3.** Combine your best player items from your Diamond Dynasty inventory and rank up to unlock rewards.

 Additional new features in Diamond Dynasty:

• World Baseball Classic Uniforms and 100+ players to earn around launch
• Sets and Seasons mean you will be earning progress towards 95-99 OVR players all the time in the XP reward path, team affinity, and special programs.
•  Mini Seasons 2.0 with rotating themes, rewards, and seven new stadiums for CPU-controlled teams
• Designated Hitter in Diamond Dynasty – who will be your best DH?

MLB The Show 23 presents Storylines a new game experience celebrating The Negro Leagues

Play Video

We could not be happier to finally introduce the Negro Leagues into MLB The Show. It’s a special project for San Diego Studio, and we are so grateful and appreciative to be partnering with the families of the players, the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, and NLBM President Bob Kendrick to bring these stories to life in a video game. 

MLB The Show 23 (Storylines Season 1*) introduces eight Negro League Players and their stories, narrated by Bob Kendrick. With this multiyear partnership with the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, our goals align with the museums to educate, enlighten, and inspire by celebrating the rich history of the Negro Leagues.

 We could not be more excited for MLB The Show 23 coming out on PlayStation. 

* Internet connection required for online features.
**Online multiplayer requires an internet connection and an online subscription.  

Email us at PSPodcast@sony.com!

Subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google or RSS, or download here

This week the team chats all things Tchia with Phil Crifo (Game Director at Awaceb), before sharing early Resident Evil 4 impressions and favorite video game movie and TV adaptations.

Stuff We Talked About

• MLB The Show 23
• Exoprimal
• Horizon Forbidden West: Burning Shores expansion
• Resident Evil 4
• Tchia (interview begins at 11:30)

The Cast

View and download image

View and download image

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[Editor’s note: PSN game release dates are subject to change without notice. Game details are gathered from press releases from their individual publishers and/or ESRB rating descriptions.]

 

Last week, we asked you to use your green thumbs to share green-themed moments from your favorite games using #PSshare #PSBlog. Here are this week’s highlights:

scottoka1 shares Cloud in green lighting from Final Fantasy VII Remake.

kani3_sun shares a green-tube experiment in Observer: System Redux

RM7_GoWR_VP shares Atreus shooting green Runic arrows in God of War Ragnarök

HazzaniVP shares Aloy staring into out-of-focus green fireflies in Horizon Forbidden West

DexM_ds shares the cat in Stray napping in green grass

MrioMoreno5 shares Slimer being his green self in Ghostbusters: The Video Game.

Search #PSshare #PSBlog on Twitter or Instagram to see more entries to this week’s theme. Want to be featured in the next Share of the Week? 

THEME: Tchia

SUBMIT BY: 11:59 PM PT on March 29, 2023

Next week, set sail and explore the world of Tchia, available now as part of the PlayStation Plus Game Catalog. Share moments soul-jumping, playing music, and exploring the archipelago in Tchia using #PSshare #PSBlog for a chance to be featured.

Hi, my name is Yang Yu. Today I am excited to share that Honkai: Star Rail, the forthcoming free-to-play space fantasy RPG, arrives on PlayStation soon. You play as the protagonist embarking on a trip aboard the Astral Express with distinctive passengers. As “The Trailblazer,” you are going to discover the realms of the universe and unearth secrets buried in legends.

Play Video

A science-fiction universe with elements of fantasy

Exploration is the core of every adventure. Honkai: Star Rail features an in-game world awaiting discovery with elements of myth blended into a space sci-fi story. In this universe, there are “Aeons,” incarnations of universal principles that can freely travel between infinite worlds, driven by their Primum Mobile — Basically, they are gods with formidable powers! The Aeons roaming the worlds uphold their own beliefs, hence various kinds of civilization thrive around every corner of the universe.

However, there is one Aeon named Destruction who considers the universe as a fallacy and civilization as cancer, casting seeds of ruin called Stellarons across the galaxy that leads to massive changes to ecosystems. As the protagonist, you are implanted with a Stellaron at the very beginning of the story. To drill down to the essence of the Stellaron, you bravely set sail for the galaxy, composing an interstellar melody filled with surprises and rewarding experiences.

Various worlds to explore

Honkai: Star Rail provides a vast universe abundant with distinctive cultures, landscapes, and scenery. It is full of rewards and secrets waiting to be explored.

You can experience the origin of the story in the Herta Space Station and then set sail to explore Jarilo-Ⅵ and the Xianzhou Luofu, two major destinations of your interstellar journey. Jarilo-Ⅵ has innumerable mysteries and dangers frozen beneath its snow caps awaiting further examination. The Xianzhou Luofu, the silkpunk flagship where inhabitants seem to have achieved immortality, foreshadows the upcoming expedition infused with Eastern fantasy.

A friendly heads-up: There are still plenty of uncharted territories to be seen. We are considering ways to propel our space fantasy into another dimension by including new in-game content. More details will be revealed in the future.

Choose your companions to face challenges

The space expedition, of course, will not always encounter hospitable inhabitants with their arms wide open to welcome your arrival. Different kinds of adversaries and hurdles need to be overcome, or your survival will be on a knife’s edge!

Fortunately, you are not alone. During the whirlwind trip of a star-chasing ride, players will meet new companions with distinctive capabilities. They are more than happy to weigh in, unleashing their powers during map exploration, puzzle investigation, and so on.

Additionally, our turn-based combat system is easy to pick up but hard to master, a perfect place to test your team-building skills and battle preparation. If you can strategically leverage each character’s skill sets masterfully, then they will all have their place to shine and reach their full potential to assist your mission.

Roaming the worlds and uncovering mysteries, Honkai: Star Rail offers a grand space journey full of twists, coincidences, and happiness. Building your four-person combat team from a wide range of playable characters, getting along with your companions, and leveraging their unique skills correspondingly to overcome challenges from every corner of the universe!

Honkai: Star Rail will launch on PlayStation in the near future. We would like to express our sincere thanks to everyone who is supporting Honkai: Star Rail. Thank you, Trailblazer, and we hope to talk to you again soon!